nucleation

LIT-1020: The Problem of the Many

1 min read

Properties2
StatusUnavailable — filed 2026-10-13 from its Crossref record, not read. Registered at the owner's request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for QUESTION-035 and CLAIM-152. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for a lawful full text on 2026-10-13 and found none: OpenAlex reports it closed (no open-access location, no repository full text); Semantic Scholar gives no openAccessPdf; the PhilPapers record (PETTPO-10) returned 403 and web searches found no PhilArchive upload; web searches found no author-posted or course-hosted copy (NYU hosts Unger's later "The Mental Problems of the Many", not this paper, and as.nyu.edu returned 403 to direct requests, so the faculty page could not be checked); a third-party bibliography page (stafforini.com) lists it but is not an author, institutional or course copy, so it was not used. The Wiley version of record is paywalled.
Tagsmetaphysics, mereology, individuation

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Peter Unger (1980), Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5, 411–467 — DOI-10.1111/j.1475-4975.1980.tb00416.x

Key takeaways

Filed, not read. Known here by what it is standardly cited for.

  • The problem. For an ordinary object with a fuzzy edge, many slightly different candidates have equal claim to be it.
  • By parity, either all of them are clouds (many clouds) or none is (no clouds). Unger argues for the second, nihilist horn.
  • It is the standard source of the problem; Lewis (1993; LIT-1015), filed beside it, is the standard reply.

Standing in the record

Filed for QUESTION-035, where a combined form’s boundary lies. The record answers with a gap-isolated block relative to a target (CLAIM-152, CLAIM-157), and a block’s edge is not sharp: many nearly equal partitions pass the same test. That is Unger’s problem in the record’s terms. The survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus found the corpus’s thermostat, with three equally defensible system boundaries, to be the same problem at small cardinality (MOM-LIT-017).

A reading should check whether the argument depends on the candidates being equally good, which a priced criterion might break by ranking them.

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